Mary Roach Quote
But peanuts are hardly representative of the average food. Everyone knows—via visual observation of stool samples, to use the New England Journal of Medicine’s way of saying a glance before flushing—that chunks of peanuts make their way through the alimentary canal undigested. Nuts are known for this. Peanuts (and corn kernels) are so uniquely and reliably hard to break down that they are used as marker foods in do-it-yourself tests of bowel transit time*—the time elapsed between consumption and dismissal.
Mary Roach
But peanuts are hardly representative of the average food. Everyone knows—via visual observation of stool samples, to use the New England Journal of Medicine’s way of saying a glance before flushing—that chunks of peanuts make their way through the alimentary canal undigested. Nuts are known for this. Peanuts (and corn kernels) are so uniquely and reliably hard to break down that they are used as marker foods in do-it-yourself tests of bowel transit time*—the time elapsed between consumption and dismissal.
Related Quotes
About Mary Roach
Mary Roach (born March 20, 1959) is an American author specializing in popular science and humor. She has published seven New York Times bestsellers: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War (2016), and Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (2021).